Northern Petroleum issues French Guiana update

Northern Petroleum (NOP) on Friday stated that it was looking at the "big picture" when it came to French Guiana, as it provided an operational update on its fully-funded four-well drilling programme.

"The four-well exploration programme has been designed to look at the big picture of this licence which covers an enormous area, equivalent to approximately 100 UK North Sea blocks," said managing director Derek Musgrove.

The Zaedyus oil discovery well, GM-ES-1, encountered 72 metres of net oil pay in two turbidite sand systems. The joint venture, led by Royal Dutch Shell (RDSB), decided to extend the exploration activities through committing to and funding a four-well drilling programme and contracted the Stena IceMAX dynamically positioned drillship.

The recently completed GM-ES-2 was the first exploration well in the current programme and the drillship will be moved onto the GM-ES-3 location to drill the second well in the programme.

The GM-ES-3 well will be targeting several Cretaceous-aged reservoir intervals. The objective of the well is to explore for significant oil volumes in the fan, help determine the Cingulata sub-surface model, possibly determine an oil-water contact, assess the reservoir potential in the north-western part of the larger Cingulata fan system and better understand the potential of the entire block.

GM-ES-3 is predicted to take approximately three to four months and operational performance should benefit from the learning experiences of the first two successfully completed wells.

"The programme is intended to provide sufficient understanding of all aspects of the reservoir, oil generation, migration and entrapment to establish and provide the necessary information to unlock the massive potential of this exciting new oil province," added Musgrove. "The focus is on this wider and greater objective rather than individual prospect appraisal, hence the minimum four-well programme."

Northern Petroleum, through a 50% holding in Northpet Investments, owns a 1.25% net interest in the Guyane Maritime offshore exploration licence. Northern is in partnership with Shell (45%), Total (25%), Tullow Oil (TLW) (27.5%), and Wessex Exploration (WSX) (1.25% through the remaining 50% interest in Northpet Investments).

View the Original article